Flip Side
by cyan96
Summary: Reincarnation is a tricky, tricky thing. In this land of lies and deceit, knowledge is power, and madman are abundant.


_...So, ahahahaha? I'm so terribly sorry with my lateness and general procrastination habits, and Swinging Pendulum will probably be updated within the next... month? Probably. *Ducks beneath table and avoids flying tomatoes*_

_This is a short piece I hacked out when trying to waddled through the writer's block I had for SP, and it's a oneshot of many oneshots I have of half-finished OC-Self Insert ideas._

_Enjoy._

* * *

_The first thing I remember when I regain my awareness is the echoes of screams and burning wood and choking down what felt like dry ice for oxygen._

_The first thing I realize is that I don't remember my own name. _

_The first thing I see when I finally find the courage to peel open crusty eyelids is the sky. Except it isn't my sky. Almost as if the world had gone topsy curvy, inside out, and painted with all the expertise of an imaginative kindergartener, brilliant green blankets the vast expanse of ozone. The ground is filled with red grass and I' crane my neck to see that I'm floating on what feels like a pink cloud made from cotton candy._

_Wonderful._

_Or perhaps, I have simply gone insane. It's hard to tell. _

_There is a trail made from the same pink substance spiralling off into the distance where a little house sits. It's pretty, but incomplete, chunks of wood and brick floats around it lazily. _

_It is almost like a dream. A mutated, floating version of a dream that can threaten to give Alice in Wonderland a run for her money. I heave myself onto my feet and take a step forward onto the road. My mind is foggy and blank, but an amused smile twists on my lips when the wisps of cloud stay solid instead of letting me plummet down to the sea of red underneath._

_There are empty spaces in this landscape. Places where colour and substance disappear into an abyss of black, as if the land itself didn't know just what to fit into those gaps. It feels surreal, I don't think I will even care if I fall down. There's something almost calm that replaces panic in my chest. Maybe it's because I'm treating this chaos as a dream. Maybe it's because I am supposed to be dead with the crash of the burning ceiling, and this the limbo between life and the afterlife._

_"I'm dead," I say aloud, as if to prove to point. Except the dead didn't walk and the living never got back up after suffocating on smoke._

_So where does that leave me?_

_I strides down the block to the house and stop, taking in the new, gleaming wood and polished marble pillars. Chunks of glass swirl around my head. The building looks like a delicate doll house-an intricate, traditional thing to be compared with the ones in old Japanese movies. Coloured windows panel one side of the incomplete roof, shifting and churning like water. . _

_It is also fantastically, despicably, upside down. _

_Screw Alice in Wonderland. The poor girl was lucky; she had a guide to follow and no upside down buildings to infiltrate._

_I twitch, before deciding to just jump through the shifting roof... windows... thingies. I'm already dead (aren't I?), there is no way things can get any worse. The window feels warm and almost gooey, like syrup, but with none of the additional stickiness. _

_I land head over heels, quite literally, in a lump at the bottom of a staircase. _

_It takes half an hour, a bunch of locked doors, and a flying apple to the head (the damned house's a gazillion times bigger on the inside than the outside, stupid dream logic) before I determine there are five, usable, accessible rooms. The rest are either locked or incomplete. _

_There is a bedroom, and it's the most normal thing I have seen yet, never mind that it seemed to belong to a pink-oriented five year old, with a small bed in the corner, green wallpaper, and a flat screen tv plastered to one wall._

_The screen flickers, for a moment there is nothing but the hum of static._

_Then sound filters through shiny might-be-plastic-you-can't-be-sure-at-this-point material and into the room. Blurs of colour ripples across the surface, solidifying into a full length mirror. There is a tiny, diminutive little girl reflected in it, looking for all the world as if she had an tea party to attend. A red dress peppered with frills hangs above knobby knees; large green eyes and a shock of undeniably pink hair are held back with a red ribbon._

**_Haruno Sakura. _**

_Ninjas. Death. Chakra. Konohagakure. Madmen with equally stupid and mad plans that shouldn't be able to work. _

**_Naruto._**

_"... Huh?" _

* * *

The first time Haruno Sakura meets the voice is when she is five years old.

(_To be honest, "meets" isn't the most reliable description. _

_To be perfectly honest, tripping over thin air and screeching with all the subtlety of a banshee can be said to be a slightly glorified, but decidedly more accurate interpretation of the true story.) _

It starts small, a slight buzz sound that appears one hot summer day when she races through the streets of Konohagakure. Sunlight pours through the market square like sheets of clear rain and Sakura prances, a basket in one hand and a new, new beautiful red ribbon threaded through her hair.

The market place isn't very far from her home, just twenty minutes away when it comes to a civilian child's walking speed. The vendors are nice people Sakura has known all her life (but the fact that they unabashedly allow a five year old unattended and to fend for herself like it happened everyday-which, it kind of did-really speaks wonders about the way of society) and today's the first day her parents has let her wonder by herself. So, Sakura, five and exited over the wonderful prospect of window shopping dutifully ignores the hum of _something_ going on at the back of her head.

_It must be the heat,_ she thinks, when the buzzing doesn't reside.

Except it isn't, or at least it doesn't seem like the overbearing weather conditions are the cause. The hum progresses, slowly and surely, like static filling up a good portion of her skull.

_"Hello._"

It echoes. The words-voice-thing in a strange, alien language. One with different sounds and a obscure cadence that can't possibly fit with Japanese, but Sakura manages to understand the greeting just fine. The tone is positively deadpan in all senses of the world, and it's drawled in a way that reminds her of a lazy feline; stuffed with sweet cream and yawning after the remaining vestiges of sleep has subsided.

Sakura _screams. _

The basket drops from her hand like a hot potato, and much to the chagrin of the crowd (whom had come to a sudden halt), a slight shove from an idiot who wasn't watching just where in Kami he was going has her fallen to the ground, tears stinging in the corners of her eyes and scratches on her hands.

The voice is still there.

Sakura can hear it, _feel it_, beyond the cacophonous interactions of the crowd. It makes a choked garble noise in a moment of solitude, a sound that Sakura figures falls halfway between hysterical disbelief, and deadpan.

"Um..." Sakura mumbles, slowly. As if pronouncing each of the syllables with utmost care will somehow make the world sane again.

"_Ohaiyou,_" the voice finishes off for her. The pronunciation is terrible and the accent atrocious, but it's a familiar word in a familiar language. "_Sakura-chan."_

Sakura faints, right there and then, her back to a sea of worried shoppers and amusement ringing in her ears.

* * *

She wakes up to the blank white of her ceiling, the vivid, disturbing, and unconditionally embarrassing events of the _dream_ (_has to be a dream, has to be a dream, has to be a dream)_ rewinding in her mind like a broken tape recorder.

Heaving a great sigh, Sakura fumbles with her thick quilt, glances down, and back up again, all the while pretending that her current outfit isn't painfully familiar.

After all, there's no way that the... otherworldly experience was anything but a dream. Right?

_"I'm Inner," The_ voice practically cackles.

And her hopes are dashed, fantastically, like a plate of scrambled eggs, because there is only so far a solid dose of denial can get you in life.

_"And you're outer,_" Inner sings.

The wicked thing surely enjoys her discomfort, Sakura deduces, and narrows her eyes in a declaration of war. Sakura is five and a little shy and she had just performed the possibly most embarrassing act in her five years. And if her future teammates are to tell you anything, Sakura is nothing but stubborn.

This is the beginnings of a beautiful relationship with equal parts insanity.

* * *

**After:**

Inner, Sakura had properly deduced, after three weeks and the horrific revelation that yes, she is stuck with this voice, is an absolute bastard.

She's polite, when she isn't randomly laughing her head off at something (Sakura doesn't know what, Inner is weird that way) but within the politeness is tiny, bitty, shards of ice and potentially fatal poison. Inner, for a lack of better words, is snarky. Her wording is all very elegant, and her tone not all that bad, but the contents are always full of vaguely teasing remarks, sarcastic comments and some carefully hidden insults (not so hidden when it came to the bullies).

And that odd language of hers... _English_ is understandable for reasons neither of them really understood, and Inner had dismissed it with something like _anime laws_, whatever that meant.

But it's not like Sakura can honestly get rid of her, and on rare occasions Inner does hand out reasonable advice.

_"Ah, Princess, that ridiculously gaudy shade of yellow looks wonderful on you."_

"... Really?" the pinkette asks suspcious.

"_No."_

"..."

Inner's just lucky Sakura hasn't found out a way to strangle her. Yet.

* * *

Haruno Sakura is five and three quarters when she decides to be a ninja.

"The world isn't all fun and games, Missy," Inner says, something like regret on her tongue and rare seriousness in her tone.

Sakura goes anyways.

Inner figures the deal had been sealed a long, long time ago.

* * *

"...Hmm?"

The question comes suddenly, made by a curious Sakura with her chin propped on her hands."Do you believe in fate Inner?"

_"Yes"_ I answer, _"of course."_

"You're lying."

"_Obviously," I deadpan, before sighing."Hitsuzen. maybe, but not fate."_

"What's that?"

_"A serious of events that have to happen in order for something else to happen Missy. You can refer to them as coincidences."_

"If coi-"

_"Think of it this way. If you want ripples on a pond, you have to throw a rock. That rock is an event, but whether or not the fishes scatter is a choice of their own. Remember, Missy, the past and the future are made by the decisions in the present. Fate or not, you are the one that controls your future." _

"Where did you find out about it? Hitsuzen, that is."

A goddamned comic book series, of course: one that tells about magic, about equivalent exchange and malicious ghosts. And in the center of it all a wishing shop. A comic book series I wouldn't have taken seriously if I hadn't been dropped into another comic book series, about even crazier things.

_"Elsewhere 'Kura-chan. A very far elsewhere."_

"What do you want to do Inner?"

"What're you talking about princess?"

"I want to become a ninja. Someone strong."

_"I'll watch,"_ I say. And that's the truth.

I'll watch, but probably never will I act. There are too many consequences. Too many different possibilities to consider. I am not god, and whether this place goes to heaven or hell is not my decision to make.

I suppose I am still treating this as a dream, that the terrible future dictated in the manga might not apply here. There are too many paths that these children can take.

The future, satisfying or nightmarish seems so far away.

_It will not be for long._

* * *

_This is a series of independent one shots. Or just a dump box for ideas of this genre I might or might not expand on later._

_Tell me what you think (reviews are the best shit ever.)_

_Sincerely,_

_Cyan96_


End file.
